Abstract

This thesis brings ecocriticism to Shakespearean performance through an examination of
adapted performance worlds. Studying cinematic and theatrical productions of Shakespeare’s
King Lear and The Tempest, it develops a strategy of ecopoetic analysis: a critical approach to
the creation of worlds in the process of adapting a play for performance. This work developed
out of my own environmentalism and experience in performing Shakespeare’s works. My goal
is to develop a critical strategy for examining performance that utilises the tools of ecological
criticism and furthers the fields of performance studies and ecocriticism.
Ecocriticism modifies the scientific analyses performed by ecologists for looking at
works of art. Beginning with the principal that everything is connected to everything else,
ecocritics focus on the interactions between elements of a work, the interactions between the
work and the world at large, and between the work and its audience. I examine the cultural
context of a work, other landmark works with which it engages intertextually, and the reactions
of original audience members, especially journalistic and academic reviewers, in order to
ascertain how an individual production adapts a Shakespearean play to a new environment.
I found in my analyses that Shakespeare’s works are particularly fertile ground for an
ecopoetic analysis. Directors, in their efforts to keep his work relevant to a modern audience,
frequently adapt and alter the worlds of Shakespeare’s plays in their productions. My ecopoetic
approach to these productions reveals the ways in which the performances engage their audience,
providing a better understanding of how to increase participatory spectatorship. I also found that
this approach reveals underlying engagements between individual productions and the culture
out of which they grew, and that the construction of performance environments is tied to cultural
conceptions of the natural world. Finally, I discovered that Shakespeare’s works are an
international language for performance, with adapters around the world experimenting with his
plays in order to further the effectiveness of theatrical and cinematic production. As such, they
are a logical place in which to formulate a new method of performance criticism, one which
engages the world of the performance, the context of the production, and the audience that
experiences the performance world.
This thesis confronts numerous difficulties, including the fact that ecocriticism does not
provide a critical apparatus as such, but is a politically-inspired way of viewing works. As such,
I develop a more rigourous method of analysis, applying the tools of ecological science
(interconnectedness, ecosystems, and adaptation), and the ethos of a modified phenomenology of
performance criticism, to the worlds of performances. The crucial confrontation in my work is
between nature and culture. I argue that the two are mutually constructing, and that performance
occupies a place in which the two meet and interact and is thus the ideal ecosystem in which to
investigate the interactions between culture and nature. Our world is endangered, the effects of
global climate change and pollution are potentially catastrophic for us all. The issues that we
face, the relationship between our human culture and our natural world, are dramatised in the
works that I examine. The ecopoetic model of analysis that I develop can be applied to a greater
variety of performance works, and this critical methodology is paramount for understanding the
world and our place within it.